living as if the Truth was true

the power and perils of visions

2011-12-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve noticed that some books which used to move and inspire me now feel foreign to me. This includes Isaac Penington’s warm and lyrical writings about life in the Spirit of God and Daniel Berrigan’s apocalyptic and lyrical writings about peace and justice and the lack thereof. I find that I have a similarly mixed reaction to some of the songs, speeches and articles sent to me by a friend who is passionately involved in the Occupy movement. I don’t mostly disagree with them. I believe, like Penington, in the reality and central importance of the inward encounter with God; I believe, like Berrigan, that our continual warmaking is a sin against the creation and the creator; I believe, like my Occupying friend, that we need to stop widening the gap between rich and poor, need a new economics, politics and culture that will focus on cooperation and sustainability rather than endless debt-fueled competitive growth. And on some level I am glad that people are talking vigorously and articulately about these things. On another level I feel remote or even wary.

It isn’t that I’m hopeless or unable to engage. Henri Nowen and Wendell Berry, still speak to my condition fully and clearly, and there is no sense of foreignness there. It’s taken me a little while to figure out what makes the difference. Lately I seem uncomfortable with sweeping words that focus on the Vision Splendid, whether the vision is of ecstatic union with God or of the sane and peaceable society, or on the Miserific Vision, whether of the soul bereft of God or the dystopian society. I still respond to writing that starts from the small scale, the particular experience of trying to care for certain persons and a certain place, and that returns to the questions of how to do this work well, though it may go on in between to speak of societal or universal truth.

I think I have some good reasons for this preference. I also think there is a danger in it.

For one thing, sometimes the Vision Splendid seems to encourage its followers to split the world into people who follow the Vision and are good, and people who don’t and aren’t. I find this annoying and worrisome but not too much of an obstacle since it isn’t generally one of my temptations.

For another, I have been disappointed (as probably most people have) by some people who had the Word and the Vision, who conveyed a vivid sense of the presence and power of God, or a passionate and hopeful cry for justice. I was moved and attracted by their messages, disappointed when I got close enough to them to see that the message didn’t seem to have penetrated very far into their daily lives. I’m in no position to judge them. I have sometimes been proud of my inspired emotions or my inspiring words, about God or about other people, even as I went on making choices that distanced me from God and made life harder for other people. I’ve been ashamed of this and tried to avoid repeating it.

I’ve tried, then, to focus more fully on being, not sensitive, moved, moving, inspired, but useful, capable, attentive, helpful. Mostly this has been good and grounding for me. But it is also capable of distortion. I can avoid or disengage from helpful renderings of the vision because of my earlier disappointments, I can get caught up in the minutiae of my daily work and forget why I am doing it. I can get busy enough, outwardly or inwardly, so that much of my daily worship time is spent lurching between to-do lists and daydreams and duty-prayers. I can feel satisfied with the progress I’ve made in a small area and then feel overwhelmed when I am reminded of the larger dangers in which I, as an American or a human, am caught up. That doesn’t help.

As usual, it isn’t either-or. I need to work well--for the work’s sake, for its importance and the pleasure I take in doing it, not to prove myself. I need to listen to my neighbors--for their sake, not to show how sympathetic I am. I need to stop my distractions and be open to God, not proud or ashamed of myself, just present. And all these things, rightly done, complete and enrich each other.

I need, also, to give thanks for and pay heed to the right and inspired words that I hear and read, whether or not they appear to me to be grounded in lives that match them. I need to speak the truth when it is given to me, and also to live by it as well as I can and acknowledge the times when I fail. I think this attempt and this acknowledgement is important both for my sake and for others’; I know too many people who are deeply hurt by or dismissive of the religion that has given me challenge and comfort and guidance and an opening into God, and I know in some cases, surmise in others, that this is because the people who spoke the words that I found life-giving lived in ways that made all their words seem suspect*. I think the same thing happens, not just with religion, but with particular causes and values that matter to me.

I need, when it’s possible, to spend time with people who speak practically, not stagily, of the joy of God and the hope for justice and the hard slogging that moves us toward these things and the grace that sometimes picks us up and moves us closer when we can’t slog any more. I miss my Quaker Meeting for this, but I do find other openings into this kind of fellowship, and I mean to hold onto them. And I am reminded that this fellowship isn’t limited by time and space. I am reading Thomas Kelly again with some discomfort (having to do with my distracted ways, not with doubts of him) and much hope.

I’d like to hear from you about what books or practices or fellowships or experiences help you to find balance, or to live your words, or to hold onto what’s good in others’ words and lives without getting too distracted by the rest.

*--I didn’t want to take up any more room in that paragraph, but I wanted to make it clear that I am not wishing that everyone would join my religion; only that they wouldn’t see it as worthless or destructive.

Dark things and bright things

2011-10-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post a few days ago when I felt anxious and discouraged. Writing it helped to clear my mind. Looking back at my blog later, I saw that I’ve written about a similar question in the late fall of each year. I am posting this anyway, because it seems to me that each year I see the issues a little more deeply or clearly.

At this time of year when the darkness grows and I am tired with the season’s work and I am more often inside where I can hear the news, I struggle with periods of inner heaviness and darkness. I am trying not to wallow in this, and not to hide from it. If I look at it clearly I may be able to understand and learn from it. I may also be able to use it as a starting point for empathy and prayer for others who struggle with the same weight, sometimes in acuter forms.

Always I am aware of what a wise Friend from my Meeting calls dark things and bright things. At home there is the richness of the harvest, the beauty of the woods and streams, the good work and caring and delight of the people among whom I live and work. There is also blight and mildew, mercury-laden fish, hurting adults and lost children whom we can’t always figure out how to help. In the wider world the stories of love, courage and renewal are balanced against the stories of violence, greed, ecological degradation. And in myself...well, there’s plenty of the light and the dark there too. The reality I have to deal with doesn’t change all that much. What does change is the pattern it makes in my mind, the way I put it all together.

There are days when it’s easy for me to see the pattern as a curse, to see the hours and days of hard work that I or others spoil with a few minutes of carelessness, the energy and devotion that we pour into deeply flawed causes, the uggsome motives that mix themselves into what we mean as good and generous acts. Occasionally this pattern comes to me as an overt thought about how the world works. Usually it sneaks in through feelings of anxiety and discouragement, a voice just too quiet to hear whispering at the edge of my brain that I might as well not try because I’ll mess it up again, and that I have to try because otherwise it will be my fault when everything goes wrong.

I’m learning to stop myself early in this despondent state, turn the volume up and listen to what’s being said. It’s helpful to realize that the two messages are countervailing, so whatever I do won’t satisfy that voice, so I might as well not waste energy trying to appease it. I’ve also found it helpful to name that voice. So far I’ve found two names that seem true to me, and that give me some power over it.

One name is the common one for the trouble I have: anxiety, which comes from angustia, narrowness. What I see when I’m anxious is generally not false in itself—the world’s problems and my faults are real. But they’re a narrow slice of what is real. Taken by themselves, they don’t rightly depict the truth.

The other name comes from Calvin Miller’s book The Singer. He interprets parts of the Christ story differently than I do, but I find his naming of the devil very helpful. He calls him the World Hater. This name reminds me that the hopeless voice isn’t personal to me, isn’t there because of something or other that I did wrong, wouldn’t go away if I somehow made myself Good; it is simply there, always, hating. This name also reminds me of the story that I do believe, which says that evil is real and sometimes appears to triumph, but that it is not the deepest reality, and it does not prevail in the end.

I believe this story, but it is difficult for me to explain what I mean by it. I’m not able to own some of the explanations that I hear given.

I know people who say that evil is illusory and that we should refrain from paying attention to it and thereby feeding it; that we should believe that God, or the universe, is good and wills well to us, and that we are good and deserving of all good things; and that if we believe wholeheartedly in this goodness we will receive all that we desire. At least that’s what I think they’re saying. For some of them this story seems to bring hope, purpose, joy. I’m glad for that. Parts of it are very close to what I believe. But I can’t base my life on this story.

I believe that evil is real, and that sometimes we need to pay attention to it and work against it. Sometimes it’s a matter of intentions. I know that I harbor the wish to hurt people and the wish to lie as well as the desires for love and truth. If I avoid looking at the harmful wishes they’re more likely to sabotage my loving and my working. Sometimes it’s a matter of consequences. If I ignore economic injustice, violence, environmental degradation, I am apt to live in a way that contributes to all of these things, more in laziness than in malice.

Tied to this is my belief that I should not, in fact, get everything I want. Occasionally what I think I want is destructive. Often it’s unnecessary and comes at the expense of real needs, my own or others’. I don’t think rigid self-denial is a helpful response. I think that self-restraint, and gratitude for what I already have, is helpful...Perhaps I can and should have what I want at the deepest level. When I look steadily into my surface cravings, not getting carried away with them and not denying their existence, I can see a deep and legitimate desire underlying them, which I understand as the desire for union, for love and work, for God. Fritz Kunkel put it better than I can: “..the deepest and most central need of the human being...[is] to face reality, to be as human as possible, and that means going through time, through change, through death, keeping nothing, not even our life, giving everything, even our own will, being poor in spirit, being one with the universe, with our darkest enemy, and with God. That is what we wish for most whether we know it or not.” That I believe. If I stay focused on that I think everything else I need will be added to it, if not everything else I crave.

I also know people who say that evil is real now, but in the future it will be overcome. Some of them see this happening progressively, through evolution or social enlightenment. Some see it happening by way of reversal, with evil growing in power but being overthrown by God in the end. Some of them seem to find hope, purpose and courage in these stories. I am glad for them, but I can’t base my life on either of these stories. One of them may be true. Or not. I don’t know. I do know that the light shines in the darkness, and I feel sure—not curious or hopeful, as I am about the final-victory-of-goodness story, but sure—that it will keep shining. I think that’s enough.

In the meantime I am helped by people who have clearly named the darkness and the light. In the dark times I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines of struggle:

“O, the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there...”

and also of struggle past:

“That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.”

And of promise:

“And though the last lights off the black West went,

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Or I read Dag Hammarskjold, or Elizabeth Goudge, or Wendell Berry, or the Bible. They lift me out of my narrowness to see the darkness and the light, and to see all the other people also pinned in the loneliness and fear that I so easily think of as mine alone. I hope and I work to be another companion to people in the dark place, another witness to the wholeness and the goodness of the truth.

And then the times of grace return. When that happens I don’t need words to hold onto. I don’t struggle to define my condition or the state of the world. I simply rest in the grace that holds me, and I delight in the light in the yellow hickory leaves, the sound of the brook running high again, the varied and satisfying work I have found, the gift of the presence of my other and brother and of the people who come through our lives. I don’t have to think of reasons to keep working or caring; both come naturally. I am thankful for this. During the dark times I remind myself that grace comes back, and during the graced times I don’t need to fear the return of the dark times; they will come, but I am slowly, steadily building a strength and clarity that keeps me on track until grace comes again.

when I say I am a Christian, I mean...

2011-05-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

I’ve been mulling over Friend Peter Bishop’s blog post on returning from Kenya, describing the difference between his experience of Christianity there and here, and his struggle with the latter. In the comments to that post he wrote: “I am grateful for the privilege of worshiping with Christian Quakers...But every so often I just want to say to them all, "Would you please go and talk to each other and reach an agreement on what you mean by 'Christian'? Come back and tell me when you've decided, and then I'll tell you whether I think I can be one."

I laughed, but I stopped to think about it too. I don’t feel it’s my place to define what Christianity is in any global way; I am weary with the disputes this occasions. On the other hand, I think I do need to know, and to be able to articulate, what I mean when I say that I am a Christian.

When I say I am Christian I mean that I have encountered God, God who made us, God beyond us in light undimmed by our darkness, God who suffers and dies in and with us and who offers healing and redemption, God who challenges and inspires; and that I have come to know that God is at the root of all of us, that we are inseparable from one another and from God; and that I am trying to live in accordance with this truth, with God’s help. This attempt is the work of a lifetime. Most basically, it requires faithfulness (keeping an inner quiet in which I can hear God, and living obedient to what I hear), solidarity (remembering that we are members one of another, living in a way that helps and does not hinder my brothers and sisters, not trying self-righteously to separate myself from them, praying for them), and integrity (being honest, consistent and whole, so that I am able to enter into relationship with God and with others). In this sense, when I say that I am Christian I am naming the root and center of my life.

There are at least two difficulties with this statement. One is that I so often fail (sometimes willfully) to actually live in accordance with what I have known. Perhaps it would be truer to say that I mean to be a Christian.

The other difficulty is that when I say “I am a Christian” some people hear this, not as a statement of relationship with God, but as a way of differentiating myself from other God-followers. What I’ve said above is, for me, the heart of Christianity, but I think it’s not (or not mostly) exclusively Christian; I can imagine that someone else might sum up a somewhat similar encounter with God, and a somewhat similar set of commitments, by saying “I am a Jew (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist....)”. I don’t believe that God is found only in one human tradition. But as a human, finite and particular, I need to be rooted and grounded in a particular tradition.

I was born into the Christian tradition—into a family and a series of worship communities grounded in the Bible and the stories that follow from it. My mother always made time for worship with me and with my brother; she had the Bible in her bones, and she passed that on to us. So it was Christian stories, songs, prayers that first encouraged me to listen for God, and that gave me words and images to describe and embody my encounters with God. When I encountered the God who suffers with us, the name I had for that face of God was Christ, and the stories of the life and work and death and resurrection of Jesus were clearly related to what I had experienced. When I became conscious of the longing for God that longing gave life to, and was given shape by, the words “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Likewise the basic commitments arising from the encounter with God answered to words I already knew---“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness”; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself”; “Pray without ceasing”; “Be not afraid”; “We are members one of another”; “Render unto no man evil for evil, but overcome evil with good” ; “Thou shalt not profit from thy neighbor’s blood”; “As you did it unto one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it unto me”; “Do not listen to the Word only, and so deceive yourselves; do what it says”; and so on.

I have also read holy writings from other traditions, and shared prayer and discussion and work with members of different faith communities, and I have found wisdom and help and good company there. But there I feel free to take whatever parts are clear and helpful to me and let the rest go. When I encounter Bible passages that trouble me I feel more need to remember them and wrestle with them. Sometimes I discover that I’m uncomfortable because I’m being asked to do something that I agree I should do, but I don’t really want to. Sometimes a passage doesn’t make sense to me because I haven’t grown into it yet. (Certain of Paul’s writings about grace, and the impossibility of being saved by our own righteousness, used to strike me as a cop-out, an excuse for not doing justice and practicing mercy; after repeated experience of the ways in which I fall short as I strive for justice and mercy, those passages strike me as helpful and true.) Sometimes I figure that a particular passage isn’t relevant to me now(like the regulations concerning mildew) or that I don’t need to understand it (like the predictions about the end of the world.) Sometimes what I read just seems wrong to me, and I have to sit with that.

This increased sense of accountability to and for Christianity is more evident and difficult when it comes to the historical and current Christian community. I am aware of great evil, and also a lot of petty malfeasance, that has been wrought in the name of Christianity. This doesn’t make me reconsider being Christian. So far as I can see, every name of God and every good cause (love, justice, freedom, even mercy...) has been used to justify harm-doing. But I do feel responsible for the harm-doing in my own tradition, just as I do for the harm-doing of my own country.

I also feel a close and warm sense of pride in the good that is done in the name of my religion, and a sort of family feeling toward the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ who have spoken truth, lived in solidarity, kept open to God, in Christ’s name. That is blessedly unproblematic. I am still trying to figure out how to deal with the other side.

At least I know how not to deal with it. In some circles I am strongly tempted to say what amounts to, “I am not one of those Christians; I am one of a much wiser, kinder and more responsible set of Christians.” That is both unhelpful and false. Unhelpful, for obvious reasons. False, because we are members one of another—at root all living creatures are, of course; but it may be true in a more particular sense of all members of a particular tradition. False, also, because I have done and said many things by which I would not like Christianity to be judged. My anxiety, my armor of apology, my self-preoccupation, are real, but they are not caused by my attempts to be Christian. They also don’t fully define me. And the people I am tempted to define as “those Christians” also have reserves of the courage, lovingkindness, integrity, justice of which I know myself to be capable, although, like me, they do not always use them. Indeed, some of them act bravely and lovingly in areas where I still flinch away.

I think, however, that it is appropriate, and sometimes necessary, to say to my co-religionists, if there is sufficient relationship so that I think I can be heard constructively, “Please don’t say this/do this in the name of our God. Please stop, pray, think again. I think this is doing harm.” And when people seem to have a very negative take on Christianity, to say ‘Yes, we have done harm, but there is more to us than what you have seen.”

And, of course, I need myself to strive to live in a way that does not make others less open to the good things that are in my tradition; and to confess when my actions betray or fall short of what I claim to believe.

Sorry that this is long and rambling. I am still trying to understand better. Writing helps. If any of you have gotten all the way to the end of this and feel inclined to say what you mean when you claim membership in a particular faith tradition, or what you hear when someone says “I am Christian”, or anything else that comes to mind, I think that would help too.

members one of another

2011-05-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

I’ve been listening with dismay to the radio and internet coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death and of the response in this country. It’s brought me up sharply against the harder side of a conviction that I normally find comforting.

“Conviction’ may not be a strong enough word. As strongly as I can know anything, I know that we are members one of another; that we are not separate or separable from one another; that we are one in God. That knowledge comforts me when I feel lonely or ineffectual, or when I grieve for people I have lost. It pushes me to reexamine ways of living that appear on the surface to make life easier for me while making it harder for other people (overconsuming; relying on other people to do work I don’t want to do or think about; telling face-saving lies...) This can be uncomfortable, but I know what to do about it. But there’s another and harder implication of our membership in one another. I have known it before, but I tend to avoid thinking about it.

A friend of mine sent on a passage from a writer who criticized certain Christians for responding to bin Laden’s death with regret and with comments about our all being sinners. That writer agreed that we all do harm, but argued that to say only that in cases where someone has done great evil is to equalize all wrongdoing and so minimize the importance of evil. No, I thought, that’s not so; evil matters, but weighing the evil I do against that done by someone else is basically meaningless, because we are not separate. Just as our courage, love, integrity are not ours alone, are from God, flow between us in ways seen and unseen, so also our cowardice, our hate, our falsehood come from one root and pass between us openly and hiddenly. And it seems to me that to deny this connection is to consent to a lie, to make an opening for hate, to strengthen evil.

For some reason it’s relatively easy for me to acknowledge this about people whom my people have declared public enemies. It’s harder for me to acknowledge this about my people when they seem to be arrogant or hateful.

And if this is true, if the light and the darkness pass between us, not only on the surface where we can trace them but somewhere in our depths, then I am responsible to the whole for my apparently small and private choices between truth and falsehood, fearfulness and courage, hate and love. I think perhaps if I truly remembered this I would come much closer to prayer without ceasing.

I know that I need to remember and to pray. I resist this. I need to work on it.

Learning to be brave

2011-03-13T17:04:00.000-07:00

I have always wished to be brave, and known ruefully that I am not. I can do things that look brave to some people: I am not particularly afraid of strangers, public speaking, heartfelt disagreements, or life without a salary or retirement plan. But in the handful of situations when I’ve actually thought I was in physical danger--interpersonal, canine or automotive--I’ve panicked; said and done things that confused and prolonged the conflict; tried to run away from the dog; shut my eyes after slamming the brakes. So there is a large and sometimes painful gap between the real and fictional heroes about whom I read, and with whom I identify, and my real life. I know it’s not just a matter of things looking better in books. I’ve seen my mother face down a snarling dog (while gripping my arm behind her so I couldn’t bolt and get chewed on), and talk down a person who was threatening. I have seen a few other real live people stand still and strong and clear in frightening situations. I’m tempted to tell myself that they were just born that way and I wasn’t, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I have groused and grieved about this for a good long time. It’s just in the last couple of months that I’ve started to grope my way toward a solution.

I set out to work on my other recurring problem, which is carelessness: lost objects, tasks partially completed and then forgotten. I have told myself dutifully that I need to be more responsible. I have agreed with myself but haven’t felt particularly eager to be responsible, to be a real grown-up. When I sat down with my journal to figure things out, I realized that I don’t want to deal with the mess in the back of the closet or look back at tasks I may not have finished, because I don’t like to admit having made the mess or forgotten the task in the first place. In fact, I feel almost afraid of admitting these things.

Aha, I told myself. This is your chance to practice being brave.

It helped. I wanted to be brave much more actively and passionately than I wanted to be responsible. As I cleared out the messes and dealt with the back-work I could feel myself regaining the energy that I had spent avoiding thinking about them. I still have work to do (!), but now I am much more apt to catch myself as I first flinch away from noticing a problem. I hope that next time a really frightening situation comes along I will have more mental energy and better habits and I will be able to stand firm.

I think of this process now when I hear fellow Quakers (I’m sure others do it too, but it’s mostly Quakers I hear) talking about the heroic struggles Friends undertook in the past and wondering why we aren’t doing something more together today. I’ve been part of groups earnestly listening for a call to greater things. I look around my neighborhood, I listen to news from around the world, and great things seem called for. But I wonder if there aren’t small and obvious things that we--personally, maybe even collectively--are willfully overlooking, and if dealing with those things might not give us the strength and integrity for the next steps.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days.

marketing meanness, and possible alternatives

2011-02-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to figure out whether I can be of any meaningful help to students at our local high school who are being bullied. The problem is still new to me. I didn’t go to high school; my friends were of all different ages, and the same-age ones I did have were part of a fairly small group of people who were mostly aware and unashamed of being different in a variety of ways.

I have been aware of particular instances of bullying among the students we’ve tried to help. I hadn’t really understood how systemic and how damaging bullying gets until two months ago, when I overheard a hall monitor trying to get a student to go back to her classroom. The student, on the verge of tears, said she couldn’t; a fellow student had started a rumor about her, it had spread, people gave her looks and said filthy things about her, she couldn’t take it any longer, if she hit anyone else or left the building on he own she’d be in serious trouble, and she couldn’t call her mother to pick her up early, because her mother was already in trouble at work for having left early to pick her daughter up on other days.

After that I kept hearing stories. A student said it is just miserable being a girl in high school; you can be mocked for not having sex, but if you do have sex you’re branded a slut and discussed explicitly and endlessly. A grandmother told how her granddaughter gets off the bus every day and sprints for the bathroom because she doesn’t dare to use the bathroom at the school. An administrator said that kids arrive at school fighting mad because of obscene or insulting messages about them that their classmates have spread electronically.

I don’t think our district is unusually rough. Earlier this year a student group from a very affluent high school visited. Some of them spoke of being upset by the verbal and physical humiliations they often saw other students being put through. Others said no, there was no bullying problem at their school; the only kids who were picked on were those who deserved it. Deserved it how? I asked. Well, they were obnoxious, they were weird, they didn’t even try to fit in. But those same students said that in any case they’d never intervene on behalf of a person who was being picked on, because if they did they’d ‘get the target put on them’.

I started researching online, at the library, by picking the brains of my friends. I met with some school administrators and started talking about how I and others from the community might be able to support their anti-bullying measures. And I started to notice that the bullying problem was symptomatic of other issues pretty deeply embedded in our culture.

I read that bullies were likely to be substantially more popular--often among adults as well as fellow students--than other kids. This seemed very bizarre to me at first. Then I read Susan Linn’s rather chilling book Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, which describes how advertising messages are designed to convince young people that they aren’t smart, sexy, popular, happy, worthy, but that they could be if they bought the right stuff. Apparently a lot of kids are convinced; in the things I’ve read a lot of people talk about bullying others or being bullied because they don’t have the right stuff. And I just finished reading Generation MySpace by Candice Kelsey, which talks (among other things) about how the lines between friendship and marketing get blurred as advertisers pay popular people to promote their products to friends, and as kids learn to market themselves electronically in order to get a large enough friend list to show that they’re not hopelessly uncool. A large part of this ‘marketing’ seems to involve looking sexy, having cool-looking friends and not being associated with anyone unattractive or unusual.

The really sad part is that both advertising and the electronic culture sell themselves as solutions to the wish for power, for community, and for self-worth, all of which they actually undermine. One advertiser quoted in Consuming Kids explains that “Kids respond well to products that allow them to make their own choices and give them a sense of control. That is because kids have very little control over their own lives...Candy can help satisfy the child’s unmet desire for control in a number of ways.” The same kid of arguments are made for cigarettes, video games, and other not terribly empowering things. Young teenagers in Generation MySpace explain that “Getting comments from friends and strangers makes me feel like I really matter..I feel so validated, like someone thinks I’m good enough to be friended...”

So what, besides the constant distraction of marketing, gives people the idea that they don’t matter? that they don’t have meaningful choices? that they’re not valid? that no one would want to befriend them? This doesn’t seem to be a problem only for a few kids with difficult families or biochemical imbalances. In fact, another advertiser quoted in Consuming Kids noted that “What used to be trusted, reliable and consistent sources of support and direction (education, government, religion...) are now objects of a great deal of cynicism and rejection. So what’s left to hold onto? In each human being there is a basic capital of trust,respect, and love which needs to be invested in something or somebody... Could brands take over the role that religions and philosophical movements used to own?”

I suppose they might, if we let them, if we don’t provide a meaningful alternative. Back when I was in my early teens I joined a church meeting about youth religious education. I was the only teenager there. Various adults talked about how the religious ed. program had to be made snappier so that it could compete with video games. I said that I really wasn’t looking for a video game-type experience, that I wanted a chance to work in-depth with some tough issues--including coming-of-age questions and social justice--and maybe to get out and do some kind of community service work. They said how nice it was for me to come and participate, and they went back to talking abut how to make sessions more amusing. Now that I’ve more or less grown up I still find myself in meetings where other adults say that kids just are constantly wired and distracted, there’s nothing to be done about it, and we have to figure out how to package community service, character education, basic education, etc. excitingly enough so that they can compete for a little piece of mind space.

I don’t think it has to be this way. The Generation MySpace author writes about taking students for weeklong camping trips without their electronics; she says they seem to relate to each other more constructively while they’re away, and that as they drive back into civilization and get into the billboard zone they groan and say they don’t want to have to deal with all that stuff. We’ve heard similar responses from some people who’ve spent time here working and walking and singing and praying and being unplugged. There is still a basic hunger for the created world, for silence, for shared work, for real (not virtual) community, for meaning. And as people work and pray together they still can start to let their prejudices down and know each other as people. This isn't an experience that can be packaged and sold. I don't always know how to invite people in as effectively as I would like to. But it seems to me essential that we keep offering an alternative for people who are ready to try it.

I would like to hear from any of you who are working on parts of this problem. I’d be grateful for stories, resources, clarifying questions, parts of the truth that I may still be missing.

hunger for fellowship, hunger for righteousness

2010-12-11T11:35:00.000-08:00

I’ve made stabs at writing this post for a couple of months now, and I still don’t feel that it’s clear or complete. I will post it now anyway to mark a question I still wrestle with.

“Hunger is my native place in the land of the passions. Hunger for fellowship, hunger for righteousness--for a fellowship founded on righteousness, and a righteousness attained in fellowship.” --from Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld, translated by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjoberg

This quote spoke to me the first time I read it. Then I was thinking primarily of my wish to move further into economic integrity, and my sense that this wasn’t easy in this culture (perhaps it isn’t in any culture) and that I would have a better chance in good company. And I did find the fellowship I needed, with my mother and brother, with the Quaker Meeting in Portland, with other brief but helpful contacts that opened my way into the work and life to which I was called--work which took me to a distance where I lost touch with the many of people with whom I’d been in fellowship. Now I have work I love, and the gap between my convictions and my life is shrinking slowly. I am (when I remember to be) very grateful for this. Now I am more acutely conscious of the ‘hunger for fellowship’ part.

I’m blessed to be here with my mother and brother. I’m blessed by the deep and real connections that we sometimes experience with our neighbors and guests. I continue to wish for some more extended and permanent community of which we might be members--for neighbors who would come to us at times of celebration as well as times of trouble; for people whom we could know would be there for us; for people who know us well on many levels and are well known by us in the same way. Also for the ability to keep in tough with people over time and know whether or not we've really been able to offer anything that makes a difference.

Sometimes I think that I lack this because I’ve moved away from the place where I grew up, or because I’ve chosen to live in a way that strikes most people as odd in one way or another. I know people who work with their hands like me, who value practical capability, who have the understanding of limits and the satisfaction with a job well done which come from doing work with concrete and readily visible consequences (and, perhaps, from having limited financial resources). I know people who share many of my political convictions, tastes in reading etc. I don’t know many people who share both. But when I listen to the people around me I realize that many of them feel even less connected to and supported by other people than I do, although some of them are married or have churches and other groups which seem at first glance to answer the hunger for connection. I see the hunger for fellowship in myself and in many other people, and I wish I was clearer about the right way to deal with it.

I have known a few people who grew up in strong, multilayered communities that were given as much as chosen: a brother and sister who lived and farmed with three generations of extended family in a valley in NZ, with Maori neighbors, and a young man who grew up in a church whose members spent a lot of time studying, playing and visiting together and helping each other, and who also went to a small Christian school. These people seemed...unbroken in some way that most of my acquaintance who are my age or younger don’t. I don’t think their lives were idyllic; there were certainly times of tension, frustration, struggle with different understandings; but still there was this wholeness or certainty that they carried. I wasn’t born into a community like that, beyond my mother and brother. My extended family lives all over the country. I went to four different churches as I grew up; most of them were composed of people who met on Sunday and saw little of each other during the rest of the week. Our town was full of people who commuted away. We had satisfying relationships with various people--neighbors, relatives, friends from church or from two different homeschool groups--but we knew most of them in only one context, and many of them didn’t know one another. And many of those relationships didn’t survive my move to NY and the Catholic Worker.

I also know people who seem to find some of this sense of community and belonging in groups of like-minded people who may not live close together or know each other in different contexts. I’ve been at various functions--’gifted’ conferences, large Quaker gatherings etc--where I heard other people saying “Finally I’m with other people like me; I’m safe; I’m understood; I’m at home.” That wasn’t my experience, though I had some good conversations, learned some things, experienced some moments of real connection.

I guess I have a strong contrarian streak; in a group of liberals asserting their unity with each other and their separation from conservatives I find myself thinking (and usually talking) about the value of chastity, temperance, groundedness in scripture, commitment, personal responsibility, and also about particular fairly conservative folks whom I cherish and admire; in a group of conservatives asserting their unity with each other and their separation from liberals I find myself thinking (and usually talking) about the importance of social justice, environmental responsibility, humility, diversity, openmindedness, and also about particular fairly liberal folks whom I cherish and admire... I mean to make our connections richer and truer. I tend to irritate people. I can be excessive about this. I also think that there is a legitimate concern about groups of like-minded people--that we may end up overstating our similarities because we don’t want to lose the connection we have found. And this can become distorting and stifling internally, as well as creating difficulties in relating to the people whom we have defined as Not Like Us.

I’ve had better experiences with community based on shared work. Wholehearted and shared commitment to the task at hand can bond people who otherwise don’t seem to have much in common and generate a certain amount of trust and understanding. For me, so far, most of these connections haven’t been long-lived, but they have been gifts while they lasted.

Perhaps part of what I need to do is to stop clutching, stop focusing on what I wish I had and look more clearly at what I already have and what I can already do. I know a few things that I need to do in order to be open to true connection. I need to listen honestly to people, to see them as they are and not mentally reshape them to suit my desires. I need to speak and act honestly and not reshape myself to suit what I think they desire. I need to be dependable. And I need to remember and give thanks for all the moments of understanding, connection, help given with which I have been blessed, with which I have sometimes been able to bless other people. I hear from some of our guests that their time with us has given them clarity or courage to move further into righteousness themselves, and I know their visits have often had this effect on me. So whether or not we remain in obvious relationship we have helped each other further into the center, into God, into the place where we are one.

Gifts and grunt work

2010-08-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

In addition to the general call to single-mindedness that I heard at this last New England Yearly Meeting sessions, a specific concern that seemed to need its own post came up clearly. This has to do with our understanding of gifts and the distribution of work.

I heard several Friends call us to recognize and support the spiritual gifts of particular individuals, gifts which were to be used for the benefit of the community. This sounded good to me, but seemed as though it could mean a variety of things. I had lunch with one Friend who spoke eloquently of the need to recognize ministers and elders, and went on to define these roles. Here’s how I understood the definition: ministers carry God’s words to the community, and are accountable to the community for their faithfulness in bearing this message; elders provide physical, logistical and emotional support for ministers and help them to discern whether or not the message has been delivered faithfully. The minister/elder relationship is not meant to be reciprocal--the elder takes care of the minister, the minister takes care of the message. People are apt to be given either the gift of ministry or the gift of eldership lifelong. This Friend felt called as a minister, and said that I seemed clearly to have a gift for eldership, as I had been busing tables and carrying things for people over the course of the week. I didn’t say much, but I didn’t take well to this. Partly that was an ego thing--I feel that I’ve also had occasion to speak the Word sometimes, which may be well and good, and I want to be recognized for that, which is not so good. Part of my reaction, though, arose from a larger concern which seemed to be connected.

Everyone is asked to volunteer with some physical work during Sessions, and I spent some time carrying trays and clearing tables. In the course of doing that work I noticed that quite a few people seemed to have loaded their trays into the rack that fed the dishwasher without sorting out and disposing of their paper and trash, as the signs clearly asked us to do. This bothered me because my work at the farm sometimes involves cleaning up after groups and I object when they don’t do their part, and because we had been talking about Jubilee and racial and economic justice and we were being inconsiderate of the folks who cleaned up after us, who were on average darker-skinned and probably less affluent than most of us. I started talking to other Friends about how we could most effectively remind people to be considerate. Some gave helpful suggestions and seemed to share the concern. (One especially helpful Friend pointed out that we should also be paying attention to the table signs asking us to avoid using trays unnecessarily, in order to save soap, hot water and the time of the dishwashers. I hadn’t been doing this, but I started after she spoke to me.) Others offered variations on, “We’re here trying to do important spiritual work, and you want to take people’s time and attention to talk about scraping plates?”

I had done something similar earlier in the week; I pushed the button on the ice-cream machine for a kid, and when we missed each other and there was a glob of soft-serve on the floor I was embarrassed and slipped away, figuring that someone would be along to clean the floor soon anyway and that would be their job and I wanted to get away from people who’d seen me being clumsy and foolish and anyway I had some other important things I wanted to do.

But I believe that the real important work, living into the kingdom of God, requires us to pay attention to the messes we make and the people who get stuck cleaning them up. I think it requires us to do more of our own basic work and to help our neighbors with theirs, rather than leaving a disproportionate share of it for poorer folks. I know this isn’t the only thing we need. I know we need ministry, teaching, the Word. But I think that if we each did our share of the basic work we’d each have some time and strength left to cultivate other gifts and use them in God’s service. I know that we need help in discerning how to rightly use our gifts. I hope we can find a way to do this clearly, consistently and lovingly, without letting our gifts excuse us from helping with the grunt-work of the world. I know both can be done; one of the things I like about Paul’s epistles is the combination of his clear writing about spiritual gifts and their care, and his insistence on the importance of manual labor.

I realize that I don’t think as clearly and calmly as I’d like to about this. It hooks into my memories of childhood involvement with the (intellectually) Gifted communityand into my recurring frustration at being considered dumb because I am farming. And it hooks into my dismay at the waste of the gifts of migrant workers who have visited us, who are usually too overtaxed and exhausted by their overlong shifts growing our food to have much time for prayer, song, storytelling... I would like to hear from others about how the recognition, nurture and exercise of spiritual gifts can be rightly exercised and balanced with mutual responsibility for basic work.

New England Yearly Meeting, part 1: seeking a single mind

2010-08-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been back from New England Yearly Meeting (for my non-Quaker friends, that’s when people from all the Quaker Meetings in New England get together to worship and make decisions) for a week now, and I’m still trying to sort out what happened there.
We spent most mornings and evenings in extended worship, setting aside our usual agendas and preoccupations so we could listen for God’s guidance. At least that was what we meant to do. I know I had trouble setting aside my own ideas about what we should do as a body, and my wish to say something noticeable and impressive, and my fear that we’d leave our time together without any sense of shared leading, and my fear that we’d settle for some Big Project that wasn’t a leading in our desperation to have something to show for ourselves... Sometimes I was able to look at these things quietly, not indulging them, not fighting them, and come into a spacious place, the place beyond myself. Sometimes when other people spoke I was able to stay there. Often I didn’t. From my own very limited perspective I thought I heard a wrenching combination of Truth and of human neediness and confusion, sometimes both emerging strongly from the same message. I still don’t know what proportions of each were present in the message I gave.
James 4:7-8 was strongly in my mind during this week. “Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God, and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” I struggle fairly constantly with double-mindedness. When I try to do the work that needs to be done to meet the needs around me, I am moved by love but also by the fear of being culpable and the desire to prove myself Good. Sometimes this double-mindedness hurried me into work that isn’t really mine or prompts me to try to solve a problem before I have taken time to understand it. But most of the time I can muddle along and do more good than harm. I thought I heard other people speaking from similarly mixed motives in their own work, and I believe that much of their work is well done. But when we come together and try to act and discern as a body this double-mindedness effectively blocks us. On the private, human level our concerns, priorities, fears, gifts, blocks are different; our only hope for real unity is in our common submission to God. And when that isn’t single-minded we’re stuck in our separate brokennesses, unable to hear, heal, help each other. We can’t effectively be the body of Christ. Of course other, more destructive forms of unity are possible; we can be a clique, or a mob. We didn’t do either of those things this week. We did acknowledge our brokenness and the call which we hear and can’t yet corporately answer. We did recognize that we had hurt and disappointed each other.
And, in small groups and small ways, I think we did help each other. After one particularly conflicted session Colin Bussiere-Nichols, a young adult Friend, invited people who had felt drawn to offered vocal ministry to talk about how they discerned whether or not to speak; I thought there was some help and deepening in that conversation, as well as tenderness for people who had felt hurt in the session. I heard many Friends say that they felt a new kind of support, accountability and connectedness in the small ‘anchor groups’ with which they met daily. I met with a small group to talk about forgiveness and felt that some good wrestling, stretching and healing happened there. Cat Chapin-Bishop's post about forgiveness speaks to this more clearly and strongly than I can at this point.
I hope that we can remember both the good things and the brokenness, and that we can practice wholeness and faithfulness over the next year. I hope I can do this. I hope, too, that I can hold onto the sense I often had in our group sessions of deeply knowing both our failure and God’s sustaining.

looking into the darkness

2010-07-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see it; and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look. --Fra Giovanni

I’ve been thinking lately about the benefits and dangers of talking about what’s wrong, broken, evil, as well as what is good. Pamela Haines’ Friends Journal article on good and evil was one reminder that I needed to consider this. Another was a collaboration with a Friend whom I admire and who is inclined to focus on the positive, to divide things into what’s good and what we can make better rather than what’s good and what isn’t. I do see at least some of the strengths of this approach: it tends to make people feel energized and hopeful, and it avoids bitterness and blaming. But I still feel some need to talk explicitly about what’s wrong. My Friend has been patient with my need for this, and has also prompted me to think about its causes.

If I don’t explicitly acknowledge problems I tend to let them fester. When I see a problem, whether in my garden or in my relationships, I’m strongly tempted to pretend that it isn’t there. Of course, when I do this the problem keeps getting worse until I can’t ignore it. Sometimes I soft-pedal the problem: okay, well, this could be better--what could I do to make it better? Unfortunately my answers to this aren’t usually adequate; I give extra fertilizer to seedlings that can’t absorb nutrients because they’re in soil with the wrong pH; I do extra nice little things for someone whom I am letting down on a basic level... I seem to have to focus squarely on what is wrong and name it before I can actually make things right. (This, I suppose, is a matter of personality. I usually assume that I can solve things, and my main challenge is to figure out what I’m solving. If I tended to see problems as intractable I might have to do something different.)

I can’t help being aware of many things that are wrong in and around me; knowing and not saying them makes them feel larger and more overwhelming; naming them makes them feel bearable. Since I was a little kid I’ve found that my fears and griefs and rages diminished to a manageable size when I wrote them down. Even before I know what to do about them, naming them brings them into the world I understand, the world whose basic goodness I trust.

Sometimes I am able to lift up my own broken places and hurtful tendencies in prayer; this helps me, and sometimes I believe it may do more than that. Once I bring my wish to lie or to hurt someone, or my overwhelming anxieties, into God’s presence, I remember that God is much more real than they are; sometimes in this process I can even see my own thwarted or twisted longing for God at the root of the ugliness, and as I sit and attend carefully to this the ugly growth begins to wither away and the longing at the root remains to become a source of strength. I know I need this personally. I think it may have some corporate significance. There’s the communion of saints, the cloud of witnesses, the ways in which love and courage and clarity are not personal properties, are shared between us in ways we don’t understand as we grow toward God. I also think that our fear, falsehood, cruelty and greed--our ill-grown longings--are not only personal but collective. And when I turn these things back toward the light sometimes I remember to pray also for the other people who are stuck in the same ways that I am stuck, and ask for turning and healing. ..I don’t have good language for this. Elizabeth Goudge’s novels say it better. But I think it matters.

What about you? Does it work best for you to simply focus on the positive? Are there ways of dealing with the negative that strengthen or deepen you in faithfulness?

A common revolution?

2010-05-11T17:24:00.001-07:00

Lately I’ve been reading things recommended by friends who are Tea Party enthusiasts and other friends who are more on the Green Party end. Sometimes I am dismayed or exasperated by the vehemence with which each side excoriates the other. Sometimes I’m able to let go of that and notice the similarities between them. Both say that our political and economic system is deeply flawed, that ordinary people aren’t well served by it and feel powerless to change it. Both sides call people to revolution, to a radical change initiated at the grassroots level. There are some real and important disagreements between sides, and I don’t mean to minimize these. Taxation, financial and environmental regulation, immigration, war and other issues of public policy, are hugely important. But they are only part of the picture. Real reform or revolution will also require us to live differently each day; to be a different kind of people. I think that most of us, liberal and conservative, don’t yet live as though we were citizens of the society we envision; the free and just society, the beloved community, the Kingdom of God. I think many of us might be able to agree on some important qualities of such citizens, and to work together to help each other gain these qualities. If we did this wholeheartedly and patiently, we might become more grounded, more powerful, more humble, and less willing to caricature or dismiss one another.

Here are a few practices with which I think we might begin. I’d like to hear how they sound to you, and what you would add, subtract or change.

Gain competence. Do more for ourselves and our neighbors.
I and some of my liberal friends deplore the excessive power of corporations. Tighter government regulations might help. But so long as we depend on a complex, far-flung and incomprehensible global market to provide all our basic needs, we will be powerless. Learning to grow food, build and repair housing, fix machinery, make music, tell stories, listen to and counsel one another is the root of real independence.
Some of my conservative friends deplore the impersonal and disempowering nature of government assistance to people in need. I share some of these concerns. I think institutional help is better then no help, and some needs may need to be met on the public level; but people and faith communities could do a lot more to take care of each other. What if we took responsibility for knowing the people in our neighborhoods and churches well enough so that we could provide each other with practical assistance? What if we took time to find out where there are communities with fewer resources that might need our help?

Consume less. Waste less.
This practice is essential to the practice above. If we are going to take responsibility for supplying our own needs, we’ll need to know the difference between needs and wants. If we are going to have enough to share, we’ll need to stop hoarding more than we need. If we expect this finite planet to produce enough resources to provide for everyone, we’ll have to stop taking more than our share.

Break free of addictions.
We can’t do any of this work well if we believe that we’re dependent on drugs, or electronic entertainment, or the good opinion and praise of the people around us, or...

Slow down.
When we do things in haste, out of fear and the desperate urge to Do Something, what I do usually doesn’t help and may actually make things worse. I just proved this to myself again yesterday morning, when I woke up to find that the predicted light frost had instead been a hard freeze; I rushed outside to sprinkle my plants with water before the sun hit their leaves, though it was still below freezing. Some of the plants I didn’t sprinkle look unhappy; most of the plants I sprinkled are dead. It’s easy to see how this works on the physical level. I think when we rush in to help people before taking time to really understand their needs, gifts and stories we may do just as much damage, though it’s harder to quantify.

Listen to the Others.
Whoever the Others may be for us, and however frustrating we find them, they’re part of the Kingdom too, and we have to learn to live with them. I’m easily tempted to dismiss or disparage groups of people (rich folks, meaning those significantly richer than me; wearers of makeup; supporters of harsh anti-immigration policies...), but usually when I get to know people who arte part of these groups I find that they have something to teach me. And there’s not much chance of my teaching them anything while I’m inwardly belittling them.

Listen to God. Obey what we hear.

This is the root. If I actually did this faithfully and well I probably wouldn’t need a long list of other principles. When I do this I am taken out of my fears, obsessions, greeds, self-contradictions, and set in the way that I should go. When I do this I know myself to be one with all the people whom I admire and love and resent and despair of, and also one with the One who bears, sustains and transforms our pettiness and grief. When we do this we are already in the Kingdom.

what sacrifice?

2010-05-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

Turnoff Week(see my last post) went well for me and also for the farm. We had local families, with little kids and grandparents and everyone else in between, in for nature walks four evenings a week, and the weather was good for finding wildflowers and salamanders and hearing frogs. A youth group from out of state also spent several days and nights with us. We got some good work done together and had some interesting conversations. The adults and youth spoke of how they’d ‘sacrificed’ their break to come live and work with us; they also praised us for ‘sacrificing’ our lives by living simply and being available to our neighbors. Both statements made me somewhat uncomfortable. After they left I began looking into that discomfort, and realized that it was closely tied to my own struggle against self-righteousness and self-indulgence and for wholeness.

I started to reach clarity as I was bicycling back from town with a carrier full of groceries. By any serious bicyclist’s standards it’s a very short trip--six or seven miles each way--but I am an intermittent cyclist, and occasionally felt stretched on the way home. I caught myself mentally grumbling about having to do most of the uphills once my carrier was full and I was tired, humming the theme from “Chariots of Fire” on particularly steep bits, congratulating myself on being disciplined, resenting being disciplined, and thinking about what I wanted to do to indulge myself when I got back. I realized that this was quite ridiculous. I also felt empathy for our recent guests. Working with our hands, eating at meals instead of living on snacks, taking time for silence and for meaningful conversations instead of being plugged into electronics--all of these things seem basic, normal and non-strenuous to me, just as the ride back from town seems to my brother who cycles much longer distances. But beginning to practice any basic, sensible alternative to consumptive convenience feels uncomfortable. And it’s easy to compensate for that discomfort by exaggerating it and claiming it as a sacrifice or a proof of my own goodness.

The truth is, though, that bicycling to town was my choice, made for many reasons. Bicycling gives me a chance to notice the flowers in people’s yards and the birds in the trees, to stop and talk to neighbors, to step back from my usual routine and clear my mind, to strengthen my muscles. It does also slightly reduce my carbon emissions; but since I have to live with the results of climate change, I can hardly claim this as a disinterested or altruistic motive. The same thing goes for keeping Turnoff Week. I can think of it as a duty, a case of good citizenship or good example-setting; but basically I observed it for the sake of my own health and balance and for the health and balance of the community, and the two are closely connected.

If I remembered this I wouldn’t fall into self-indulgence or self-righteousness, which arise from a false separation between a sense of duty and a sense of pleasure, both too narrowly defined. I want to move beyond these and work for wholeness in myself, solidarity with my neighbors, unity with God, for my sake and everyone else’s.

This isn’t a sacrifice. This isn’t always easy either; then, nothing is. In John Holt’s writings I encountered a Spanish proverb that sticks with me as I keep trying to live as if the Truth was true. “Take what you want, says God; take it, and pay for it.”

Be still and know...

2010-04-17T15:52:00.001-07:00

This is the third year that I’ve organized activities in my neighborhood to celebrate Digital Detox Week (which used to be TV Turnoff Week), and the first time I’ve actually felt a need to change my daily activities because of it. We still don’t have a television, but over the past year I’ve spent more time reading blogs and also joined Facebook. I won’t be doing that between April 19 and April 26. First I thought of this as setting a good example, since I’m encouraging other people (who have a digital fixation that seems obvious to me) to try the electronics fast. I think I may need it for more personal reasons as well.

I do see value in the things I do online--I’ve reestablished contact with some long-lost friends and relatives through Facebook, and actually gotten into substantive correspondence with a few of them; I’ve read blog posts that have challenged, reassured and clarified me. But I also find myself slipping online to stuff an inner emptiness--to paper over loneliness, to distract myself from dissatisfaction, fatigue, the knowledge of failure or other uncomfortable realizations. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, I’m not doing anything really mindless or destructive...but stuffing that emptiness is inherently destructive. In that emptiness I am dis-illusioned, cast out of the imaginary securities that I construct for myself, and forced to know again my dependence on God. In that emptiness the still small voice may speak to me. From that emptiness I return to my work and my community, less grasping, less confused, more ready to give and receive truly.

So I hope to come back from the fast week with a greater mindfulness about my real purpose in my online time. If any of the rest of you are trying a media fast, I’d be interested in hearing about why you’re doing it or what you learn from it--after I come back.

the good-enough line

2010-03-24T10:10:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid my family attended a Methodist church, but on Wednesday afternoons I went with a friend to a Baptist Bible school. I was ten years old when my friend’s parents, who were in charge of my class, led an object lesson on grace that has bothered, helped and stuck with me through the intervening years.
They drew two lines in the dirt of the parking lot and had us stand behind one. Beyond the other, several feet away, they wrote “Being Good”. They invited us to jump across. I was a long-legged energetic kid and wanted desperately to be good, or good enough. I jumped hard and fell just short. No one else made it either. The teachers asked how we could get across. I suggested being able to touch ground once in the middle, and that was vetoed. I asked if I could try again; they said yes. I fell short again.
Then my friend’s father said that he would carry anyone who asked him across on his back. (He got to walk, not jump.) The other kids started to ask him. I took a running start and jumped again, getting both arms and most of one leg across the Good line, and clutching the dirt on that side as though the gap was a bottomless pit. They said I hadn’t gotten all the way over, it didn’t count. I realized that I was making them uncomfortable; they were some of the kindest people I’ve ever known, and they didn’t like to distress me; but on this point they wouldn’t be budged. Neither would I. Finally they redrew the Good line so that even I could see that I couldn’t jump there.
I gave in and asked my friend’s father to carry me across, apologizing for my size and weight and for the distance he had to go. He said it was fine and set me down on the other side, where they talked to us about Jesus’ unique power to overcome our sins and reconcile us to God, and urged us to ask Jesus into our hearts. I didn’t listen well; I was still resenting the redrawn line. I could have been good enough, should have been good enough, was almost good enough... My friend’s parents saw that I was upset and tried to comfort me, but I wasn’t very receptive.
At first I found the lesson fairly easy to dismiss. I saw the harm done by myself and by others who claimed to be Christian, and I figured asking Jesus for help wasn’t sufficient. I knew people (not including my friend’s parents) who seemed to think that their correct belief freed them from the consequences of sin and therefore from having to attend carefully to how they lived. What I wanted wasn’t so much to be forgiven (though I did sometimes crave that) as to do less harm and more good. And that seemed to require a lot of hard work, a lot of leaping in the dark. I prayed, not to be carried, but to be given enough strength to do what I needed to do.
And, of course, as I grew up I found out over and over that what I could do wasn’t enough. In spite of my best efforts I couldn’t answer most of the urgent needs around me; this was especially hard to accept when I was working with children who were ill-treated. Worse, I couldn’t do away with my own destructive tendencies. I came to a clearer understanding of what it might mean to be carried. I needed to stop pushing desperately to do things just because somebody had to, and also to stop turning away from truths that pained me and comforting myself with daydreams. I needed to slow down and learn to listen to what God was actually calling me to do. I continue to struggle with this, but when I do it well I am aware of being strengthened and guided in the work that is mine, and of being able to hold the work that is not mine in prayer, knowing that it is in God’s hands. I used to look at the hard lives of some of my neighbors or the destruction going on in more distant places and think, God has dropped them; God isn’t taking care of them; therefore I should be. I still look at these things and fall into grief, anger, discouragement, wish that God or someone else would step in and set things right; but I have some more confidence that Christ is still there in the midst of the darkness, suffering with us, offering meaning, companionship, a way forward into Life. And I know, now, that the way into this Life requires leaping and being carried, listening and hard work and acceptance of whatever the results of that work may be, acting and being acted on and through in turn.
As I began to understand that I thought that I had learned the lesson, though it took me more than ten years. But now it comes back to me in a different way as I struggle with anxiety. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in the desperate attempt to convince myself and anyone else who might happen to be watching that I am Good. This makes it very hard for me to see my faults calmly and deal with them honestly. Worse, it keeps me focused on myself in a way that makes it harder for me to pray well, or to truly see the people around me. I’ve had inklings of this for some time; in the parable of the rich young ruler in my Bible there are old double underlines under Jesus’ question, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” I can’t remember now what I was thinking when I marked the passage. But lately it has been in my mind again, along with the Bible-school lesson, and it seems to point a way forward. The point isn’t for me to be good; the point is for me to be rooted in God’s goodness, and to help to bring it more fully into the world. From this perspective my faults still matter, because they make it harder for me to enjoy or embody God’s goodness; but they don’t threaten the basis of my world. I can bear to look at them long enough to change them instead of hiding from them. I can let myself go and really see the people around me, and really see God.

I don’t know how much of this my Bible-school teachers had in mind. I do know that the lesson means a great deal to me now, but didn’t mean much at all until I had time to live into it—and it has taken me a long time indeed. I need to remember this when I mean to open other people’s minds to the truths that seem important to me.

the root of the question

2010-02-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

I’m coming out of my January funk and enjoying the lengthening days. I’m still trying to figure out how to engage other people in a way that makes sense. Often even in groups of people trying to address the same concern I seem to be asking questions at a different level.

Last month I heard that the director of a nearby early learning center was seeking help with reading etc. for students, and I thought perhaps we could do that; but when I inquired further I learned that she wanted auxiliary homework help. I do know that the kids have to get through their homework in order to avoid trouble at school. But when I’ve tutored other kids I’ve found that the work seems to be scattered, remote from the actual lives and interests of the children, and often several levels beyond their comprehension. What I’m interested in is stepping back and working on the foundations of understanding math and language. The learning center kids will be coming out to the farm to explore in the woods and help make birdhouses come spring; until then we don’t seem to have projects in common.

After my last blog post about challenges in my Stop and Think! counter-recruiting visits to the high school, a Friend wrote to suggest that students would respond better if I dressed up in a way that made it clear that I was successful. I had to stop and think about why this didn’t seem right. I don’t own the right clothes, and I’m not a ‘success’ in the usual way; I don’t have a degree, a job title, a salary, a retirement plan. More basically, my message to the students isn’t “Avoid the military and you can be a success.” I don’t think this is necessarily true. Our economic system is configured in a way that requires a large number of ‘losers’ to do the unprofessional but necessary work that feeds, clothes and houses the ‘successful’. And many of the kids at the local school are starting at a disadvantage; that’s why the recruiters spend so much time at the school and appeal to so many students.
Furthermore, I look at ‘successful’ people of all ages and am not convinced that their success translates to a meaningful, integrated and satisfying life, or even to freedom from fear. Our economically privileged guests still worry aloud about not having enough, or about losing what they have; and they speak of loneliness, of lacking time for prayer, of feeling trapped in work that pays their bills but doesn’t satisfy their souls. So what I want to say to the students, and to all our guests, is “Don’t listen to the people who try to sell you safety, happiness, importance. Nobody’s safe, except in the sense that we are all in God’s hands. You can find sufficiency, and sometimes happiness, without a lot of money. You are already important; you are a living soul. Your life matters. You have real and important choices about how to use it. Make them with your eyes open.”

At the end of January I took part in the first session of a group study/reflection/action course on Jubilee. As most of you probably know, the Mosaic law designated every 49th year as the Year of Jubilee when debts were to be forgiven, slaves freed and land restored to the families who originally worked it. It was also one of the Sabbath years, which were to occur every 7th year, when the land was to be left fallow and the people to trust that God would provide the food that they needed. We seek to live more fully into the values of the Jubilee—economic justice, forgiveness, liberation, trust in God and abandonment of illusory human security—in the context of the work to which we have been called.
For several of the other course participants this work is tied to the attempt to bring about large-scale political change—ending war or torture, limiting corporate influence in politics, strengthening environmental protection etc. I admire this work. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I see the abuses that they wish to correct, but it seems to me that these abuses are not isolated policies but the natural result of the system by which we live. And I don’t know how to change this system meaningfully on a large scale. I only know how to meet people one by one and invite them into a space where they can examine their lives, decide what matters to them and find ways to live accordingly.
It’s not a matter of preaching at people, but of offering an example and a space. We’re sometimes amazed at what happens when we offer these things. A migrant worker decides to go home, plant a garden, keep goats, and buy less so that he is able to live at home and be with his children instead of traveling to this country and taking abuse and long separation from his family in order to send home money that would enable them to have an American lifestyle. A college student changes from a major that seemed lucrative to one that allows him to do work he loves. A seeker stops frantically trying to do more Good Works and decides to take some significant time for prayer.
Sometimes what we offer doesn’t make sense to our guests, and there is frustration and loneliness on both sides. Often I look at the needs around us and realize how painfully inadequate our offerings are. Then I need to remind myself that the results of our work aren’t up to me. All I can do is stay faithful and stay open. The rest is in God’s hands. And also in the hands of the people who do the good work that I am not clear to do.

reaching through despair

2010-01-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

I’m going to a nearby high school every month, setting up a table in the front hall with information about the drawbacks of military service which recruiters tend to gloss over and about other possible ways of earning money, traveling, learning skills and serving America. Two months ago I was greatly encouraged when a young woman told me that she’d decided not to join the National Guard once she learned that Guard members could be sent into combat overseas, so she was looking into civilian service options and encouraging her friends to do likewise. My last visit was less encouraging. A young man stopped by and said he was joining the military. I asked why, as I usually do. Some students tell me they’re eager to protect their country from its enemies; some say military service is a family tradition; many say the sign-up bonuses are good and where else can they earn that kind of money? This one said that he was in all kinds of trouble--alcohol, drugs, knife fights--and fighting seemed to be the only thing he was good at. He wasn’t worried about dying--he’d be a hero then, and his life stunk in any case. He was aware of counseling services, work and service opportunities, all that stuff; it just didn’t interest him. What was the point?
I’ve heard other young people give similar reasons for enlisting. I’ve heard a similar sense of the worthlessness of life from visitors and friends (some from apparently good families and privileged backgrounds) who have decided that the only way to keep going is to keep themselves distracted, with alcohol or drugs or virtual reality or... And I don’t know what to say to them. I try to listen to them while they’re present, try to pray for them afterward. I know that’s inadequate. Sometimes I think that the problem is that I can’t imagine being in their position, can’t imagine finding life meaningless, and so can’t make a case for meaning in language that would reach them where they are.

And then I get brought up short by my own times of disillusionment and discouragement. I’ve been in one of those lately.
Part of it has to do with externals. I keep thinking I’ve cured myself of having unrealistic political hopes, but my dismay at the increased military intervention in Afghanistan, at the ugly fight over health care reform, at the Supreme Court ruling lifting what restrictions we had on corporate money in political campaigns, shows that I still haven’t learned.
Part of it is disappointment with myself. I am doing work I chose, work I value, but often I don’t do it well. I work hard, but when there’s a problem I try not to see it,and once I can’t help seeing it I grab at a solution, any solution, rather than stepping back and looking at the root of the problem. This generally means that the problem continues and wastes a lot of time and energy, mine and others’. It also means that I lurch back and forth between excessive confidence and excessive lack of confidence. In the latter times I also tend to bury myself in distractions (novels, Facebook, busywork...), and to daydream about doing something spectacular that would somehow compensate for the daily failures. At those points I can very nearly imagine being where the desperate people I meet seem to be.

And yet I don’t conclude that life stinks. There are things that make that easier for me: I live in a beautiful place where walking in the woods and fields, listening to the streams, is a great comfort, when it isn’t too cold, and I live with people I love. And even in the times when I don’t seem able to see and be glad in these things, on some level I continue to remember God--to remember that there is life and light and meaning that can’t be destroyed by human carelessness or malice, either my own or other people’s; and also that that light, life and meaning can be brought more fully into the human world by people who attend to it. Knowing this, I can’t despair.
But if I really knew this, knew it all the way down, I wouldn’t waste energy in hiding my faults from myself and other people, or in resenting people who disappoint me, or in refusing to forgive myself for disappointing others. On some level I still figure that I’m the center of the universe. From this position I can’t bear to be wrong, so I ignore what I know about my shortcomings and demand the approval of other people to reassure myself. From this position I try to ‘keep score’: am I doing enough good, in view of all the good things that have been given to me? Are other people doing enough for me, in view of all the good things I’m trying to do? From this position guilt, resentment, desperation come easily, and prayer, gratitude, love, understanding, do not.

Perhaps if I could learn wholeheartedness; could consistently step out of the center of my imaginary world and live in God’s world; could see clearly what is around me, respond to it faithfully, and trust God both to show me what I can do and to care for the things that are beyond me; then I could help other people to make the same transition. Perhaps by speaking about it (though not in religious language at the school). Perhaps just by virtue of living from the deeper level, the place beyond words where we all are one. In the meantime, I try to remember them both in the dark times and in the times of grace.

whose burdens do we bear?

2010-01-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” –Galatians 6:2
“Every man shall bear his own burden.” --Galatians 6:5

These two teachings have been on my mind lately for several reasons. St. Francis Farm is holding its annual review/discernment/planning session, looking at the work we are called to do and the things that sustain this work. I just filled out my annual Medicaid application. And the response to my first blog post, particularly this comment, brings up the old liberal/conservative argument about personal responsibility.
This argument can become very polarized when it’s theoretical. In my daily life and work I see truth in both sides of the argument, in the command of Galatians 6:2 and that of Galatians 6:5, and I am trying to find a balance between them.
I tried to write about this whole question in one post and it became hopelessly unwieldy, so I’m splitting it in two. This post looks at how we bear the burdens of our own and others’ physical/material needs. The other kind will go in the next post.

I see the damage that’s done when people are divided into helpers and helpless, when wealthier people come to Help the Poor, feel good about themselves and reinforce their feeling that they deserve to have more, and less wealthy people take what they can get at the expense of their dignity and agency. This does harm to everyone involved.
I see the damage that’s done when people insist that they are not their brothers’ keepers and that they are entitled to whatever they can get. This leaves some people glutted with things that give them ever less satisfaction, and others going without what they need. This does harm to everyone involved.
I see the good that is done when we willingly bear each other’s burdens. We all need help, we’re all capable of helping in one way or another, and we all need to be willing to give and to receive. The children whom the local school sends to us in the summer explore in the woods and fields with us and take vegetables home to their families; they also help us in the garden. We set it up this way because we needed their help if we were going to take time to explore with them and still grow enough for ourselves and for sharing with neighbors and the soup kitchen. When we hear them talking to their parents it’s plain that they take pride in being needed, in having something to give. We’ve received gifts of time, know-how, useful items and money from people who plainly were getting by with very little. It’s humbling to accept these gifts. It also makes it possible for us to give. And we find that the more privileged people who come to us meaning to help also hunger for wholesome food, people to listen to them, quiet time for prayer, work that can be shared and that has tangible results.
We all also burden each other in ways that are less voluntary. I can’t help being aware of this when I fill out my Medicaid forms. Taxpayers aren’t being asked to donate so I can have health insurance; that money is demanded from them. I can see why some people object to taxation for social programs as forcibly burdening some people in order to support others. But our economic system does this as well as our political system. Many of the people who grow our food and manufacture our clothes and our electronics aren’t doing it because they care about us, or because they find the work fulfilling. They’re doing it because they need to live and they can’t find better employment. Many of then aren’t working in conditions that I’d work in or wish on anyone else. This isn’t necessarily the result of their choices. I’ve heard experts talk earnestly about helping people to rise out of poverty by teaching them ‘middle-class skills and values’ so that they could get office jobs. I asked who would provide for our physical needs once we were all office workers. They said there would always be plenty of people who failed to rise and weren’t willing to discuss the rightness of a system which requires some people to stay ‘down’. I don’t know what to do about this except to reduce my demands and do more of my own work—to bear more of my own burden—and to remain mindful of the people who are still forced to bear part of my burden for me.
And sometimes I am less able to bear others’ burdens than I wish to be. One of the hardest parts of our work at the farm is saying no to people who ask us for help. Sometimes we say no because the request doesn’t seem to make sense or because it seems that they are in difficulties of their own making and keep choosing things that make it difficult to help them. Sometimes the need is very clear but we still don’t feel able to meet it. In our first year at the farm, when we were struggling financially, a family called and asked us to finance a new well and septic system for them. We couldn’t. We’ve been asked to provide hospitality to people who were dealing with active addictions, or who had severe mental health issues and lacked an outside support. We didn’t have the training for it and didn’t feel we had the emotional energy either.
Sometimes the needs around and within me exceed the apparent strength around and within me, and I am discouraged. Then I have to remember that we are all in God’s hands, and I am not God. It isn’t up to me to figure out how to make everything come out right; only to do my part as faithfully as I can, and then let the rest go and give thanks for all the good gifts that come to us each day, beyond all deserving.

a new year

2009-12-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

This from the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner speaks my mind as I look ahead to the new year:

And so the new year is coming. A year like all the rest. A year of disappointment with myself and others... The year in which decisive hours are approaching me quietly and unobtrusively, and the fulness of my time is coming.... Outwardly, of course, they will not look any different from anyone's everyday moments of good works and proper omissions. Consequently I may overlook the--the slight patience which makes life slightly more tolerable for those around me; the omission of an excuse; taking the risk of building on the good faith of those I would be inclined to mistrust because I think I have had unfortunate experiences with them before; genuine acceptance of their being good grounds for someone else's criticism of me...to allow an injury done to me to die away in myself without prolonging it by complaints, rancor, bitterness and revenge; fidelity in prayer which is not rewarded with ‘consolations’ or ‘religious experience’; the attempt to love those who get on my nerves (through their own fault, of course)...the tolerance which does not pay back another’s ‘intolerance’ in kind; the endeavor not to trade on my virtues as a charter for my faults; a prompt will to improve myself when I see sins in others and would dearly like to reform them; the firm conviction, firmly maintained against myself, that I very willingly and easily delude myself and leave a number of faults and pettinesses undisclosed which would strike us as patently obvious in anyone else; the suppressed complaint and the self-praise omitted and many other things which would only really be good if one practised them constantly, though it is true that it is better to do something than not to do anything at all, for one cannot manage everything at once.
We only need seriously to try to do such commonplace everyday things. Then they become terrible...

Living as if the Truth was true

2009-12-27T08:51:00.000-08:00

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

James 1:22, NIV

The gulf between word and deed is untruth. The dissonance between creed and deed is at the root of innumerable wrongs in our civilization; it is the weakness of all churches, states, parties and persons.

--from The Life of Mohandas Gandhi by Louis Fischer

I’ve always loved words and ideas. I’ve devoured books eagerly ever since I learned to read. I have been stretched, challenged, moved and delighted by other people’s words about faith, love, justice, truth, sustainability. Sometimes I have been able to speak movingly about these things myself, and I have prized that ability highly. But as I look at the world I don’t see a desperate need for more eloquent words, more moving expressions of conviction. I don’t think I have anything to say about the grand scheme of things that has not already been said, and said better, in many different eras and languages. I don’t think most of the problems in my life or in the lives of my neighbors come from a lack of inspiring words and laudable convictions. I think they come from our inability or unwillingness to let those words become flesh, to align our lives with our convictions.

I think there is something particualrly dangerous in professing excellent principles and not laboring to bring our lives into line with them. If I proclaim my trust in God but don’t to listen carefully to God, and follow what I hear faithfully, then I become anxious, shallow and self-contradictory, and it would be easy for people to look at me and conclude that my faith leads to futility and exhaustion. If I proclaim my belief in peace and economic justice and yet consume things in a way that requires war and the exploitation of other people, then people could easily look at me and conclude that peace and justice are nice ideals but can’t be put into practice. So I need to learn to embody the truth rather than just talking about it.

The best phrase I’ve heard to describe this unity I seek comes from a Spanish biography of Dorothy Day, which praised her for practicing ‘l’arte de vivir como si la Verdad fue verdad”, which translates roughly as ‘the art of living as if the Truth was true.” It’s an easy idea to grasp; it’s harder to practice.

Perhaps the hardest thing is admitting the gap that exists between our words and our deeds. Certainly it was hard for me. As a child growing up in assorted Protestant churches I believed in and talked about the importance of loving God wholeheartedly and loving neighbors as myself. I often tried to be fair and kind to my family and neighbors, but sometimes I didn’t try at all, and after those times I was painfully aware of the gap between what I was and what I meant and professed to be. Often I dealt with this by making grand resolves about future good behavior and forgetting my lapses as soon as possible.

As I grew my understanding of God’s call spread to take in issues of peace, social justice, environmental health. (I was homeschooled, so I had time to put into whatever mattered to me). I read about these issues and wrote letters to my Congressmen and to the editor of the local paper. I volunteered for various good causes. I dreamed of becoming an activist. I thought that before I had to manage money, my own or my possible future nonprofit’s, I ought to study economics. I did. It was profoundly disquieting. I learned almost more than I could bear about how the people who produced the food I ate and the clothes I wore were treated, and how the land that supplied the basic resources I consumed was treated. I was smacked up against the realization that my everyday consumption required people to be treated as I would not be willing to be treated; that there was a contradiction between my deepest convictions and the consequences of my daily life.

This time I didn’t try to hide from that realization. I was very fortunate in my mother, who helped my to look squarely at the truth without getting overwhelmed and distracted by my feelings of guilt and confusion. I was also fortunate in coming across John Woolman’s Journal and reading about his struggle to reorder his life so that it didn’t depend on slave labor. The Journal showed me that it really was possible, though not easy, to live as if the Truth was true. It also led me to the Quaker Meeting in Portland, ME, which offered good company, hard questions, and practices for spiritual discernment. With their help my mother and brother and I found our way to St. Francis Farm in upstate NY. I’ve been here for the past eight years, working as a volunteer, trying to live an alternative to the consumer culture and to be a good neighbor. For my part this involves starting and ending the day with prayer, growing food to eat and share, listening to neighbors and guests and helping them as I can. (More information about St. Francis Farm is available at our website, www.stfrancisfarm.org A fuller version of the way that led me here, and what it’s led me to, is here in an article I wrote for New York Yearly Meeting’s November newspaper issue on money and class. I’ll post more on the money/work issue soon.) This life has pushed me into further realizations about what is worth doing, and I am still trying to live into these.

I certainly haven’t arrived at wholeness. My life is still full of contradictions. But I have taken some first steps and I keep going. And I find myself less and less satisfied with disembodied statements about the Way Things Ought to Be and more and more hungry for others’ stories about how they are living into the truth.

So, in this blog I want to write about some of the ways in which I am trying to practice the truth as I understand it, what helps me and what hinders me. I am interested in hearing about how you—any of you—strive to embody the truth as you understand it, and what helps and hinders you.

I want this because it helps me to find wholeness in myself. I also want it because I believe that this kind of dialogue can bring people into communion across political and theological divides. It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s theological or political creeds. It’s harder, at lest for me, to dismiss someone who says “This matters deeply to me, and I am doing this and this to try to live accordingly, but I still struggle with this obstacle, this blindness, this fear.” I have learned about faithfulness from people whose faith had a rather different content from mine. I think support in faithfulness is one of the best gifts we can offer each other.